Ben Sixsmith

Unsurprisingly, David Berman hated his dad. When he broke up his band, the Silver Jews, in 2009 he released a statement which announced: 'My father is a despicable man. My father is a sort of human molestor [sic].  'An exploiter. A scoundrel. A world historical motherfucking son of a bitch. (sorry grandma)' Obviously, Berman felt as if the sins of the father had tainted the son. 'This winter,' he wrote, 'I decided that the [Silver Jews] were too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm he has caused.' He swore to seek justice by other means. Apparently, this involved writing a book but it never materialized and Berman all but disappeared for about a decade. Berman reappeared in 2019, with a gorgeous album, Purple Mountains, and plans to tour.

I hear the sound of chanting in the distance, grim and ominous. ‘Boom, boom, boom, boom ba boom, boom, boom...' Suddenly, voices cry out: ‘Je-sus walks!’ A white-robed Kanye West is surveying the geodesic dome structures that he has built across his lands. A MAGA hat is pulled over his brow and the sun glints off his oversized sneakers. Kim Kardashian stands beside him in a bodysuit that strains against her preternaturally tumid curves. Kanye announced that he was building the housing complex for the homeless in 2019.

Despite his slender frame and greater affinity with high-end fashion brands than street gangsterism, 30-year-old American rapper A$AP Rocky has never been one to avoid confrontation. Videos on YouTube show him threatening to ‘snuff’ a giant English man, who promptly tells him to ‘do one, bruv’. Thank God some people have kept the spirit of the duel alive.Last month, however, words ended and fists flew. Rocky was arrested during a tour of Sweden, and video emerged of him swinging a young man through the air and into the pavement. Frankly, it was an impressive, if acutely dangerous, display of physicality. This, and he and his colleagues’ subsequent kicking and stomping of the young man and his friend, made this look like an open and shut case.

The Von Erichs were, at one time, the toast of Texas: a family of chiseled, clean-cut American lads who took on bullies, thugs and liars in the wrestling ring. Girls wanted them. Boys wanted to be them. Advertisers wanted to throw money at them. Under the watchful eye of the family patriarch, Fritz, young David, Kevin and Kerry Von Erich seemed destined for greatness. Then David died, on a tour of Japan. There were rumors of a drug overdose but the autopsy ruled that he had had a heart attack after suffering from enteritis.

The case of Jussie Smollett is, among other things, an accidental tribute to the life and work of Tom Wolfe. Wolfe, who died last year, annoyed progressives with his portrayal of white guilt and black radicalism in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and the contempt he expressed for identity politics and fashionable attitudes in other works. Wolfe, who coined the term the ‘Me Decade’, delighted in mocking cultural narcissism. He argued that America was full of ‘status spheres’ in which politicians, artists, activists and others jockeyed for cultural capital. One of his favorite targets was fashionable victimhood.

You never knew where Andy Kauffman the character ended and Andy Kauffman the human being began. Whether he was wrestling women or reading The Great Gatsby aloud, onstage, until he had emptied a theatre of his own fans, the great performance artist always asked the question of whether it was merely an act or whether the antics reflected real instability. When Kauffman died of lung cancer at the age of 35, some people even wondered if he had faked his own death. Many comedians have aped Kauffman’s deranged realism but his true heirs are not comics. They are right-wing performance artists like Alex Jones, Jacob Wohl, and Laura Loomer. Are they Trump-loving, left-hating, conspiracy-theorists? Or smart businesspeople exploiting their audience? Are they mad?